Selfless Self-Portrait

TOWARD FREEDOM-- Jawaharlal Nehru --John Day ($4).

Jawaharlal Nehru is in jail again, serving a four-year term. He has had plenty of that: only twice since 1921 has he been out for more than a year at a time. Nominally, his offenses have been slight. Actually, his offense has been that he is one of the world's most uncompromising advocates of unlimited democracy, continuously troublesome in the imperialistic back yard of democracy's present arch-defender. He has been three times President of the Indian National Congress; next to Gandhi himself he is the most powerful leader in India. And as a leftist, undiluted by religion, he is more dangerous to British interests than Gandhi.

In one of his sessions in prison, back in 1934-35, Nehru wrote his autobiography. Published in England, it became a sort of classic among liberal Englishmen, has run through 14 printings. Somewhat revised now for U. S. readers, and brought nearly up to date (August 1940), it seems unlikely that it will reach any such status here; much of its political history is a little too remote from U. S. interest. But as a self-portrait of a great and selfless man, and as an intimate if less complete portrait of a great incipient nation, it has, for any reader anywhere, unique power.

Nehru was the somewhat spoiled son of prosperous parents. He was educated at Harrow and Cambridge, spent a soft period in London dabbling in Fabianism, studying law. During World War I, back in India, he joined a couple of home-rule leagues, got married, first came to know Mohandas K. Gandhi. But when post-War restlessness brought the Rowlatt Bills and Gandhi's first defiance in India, Nehru was in at the birth. He was profoundly excited by that first great wave of nonviolence, came as near religion as he had since early childhood (not very near), and was no less profoundly baffled when, almost at the crest, Gandhi called off the show.

From then on Nehru's autobiography is most fascinating as a study, in constant action, of three divergent political types: Nehru himself, his father, and Gandhi. Nehru's father, at 59, gave over his law practice and devoted the rest of his life to politics. A rich bourgeois, he was inevitably the most conservative of the three, and Nehru's differences with him, along with their great mutual affection and respect, form a fine, touching father-&-son story that many a novelist could envy.

Nehru's respect for Gandhi, whom he knows intimately, amounted almost to reverence. But it did not blind him to things he doubted or deplored. Gandhi's inhuman asceticism, his revivalistic virtuosity, appalled him no less than his medieval regard for the rich as God's "trustees," his conception of democracy as one's "complete identification with the poorest of mankind, longing to live no better than they." Such ideas, to a bourgeois, who was moving from nationalism to ideas of a new world order, from Socialism towards Communism, were not only incomprehensible but dangerous. Constantly, and rather pathetically, Nehru refers to his hope of converting Gandhi to his own views. Yet Gandhi "does represent the peasant masses of India; he is the quintessence of the conscious and subconscious will of those millions."

Nehru's level, toneless style so dignifies what he says that his occasional attacks of angry oratory are excusable:

"What a long time it is since the British came here, a century and three-quarters since they became dominant! They had a free hand, as despotic governments have, and a magnificent opportunity. . . . And yet. . . what is India like today? A servile state, with its splendid strength caged up, hardly daring to breathe freely, governed by strangers from afar; her people poor beyond compare, short-lived and incapable of resisting disease and epidemic; illiteracy rampant; vast areas devoid of all sanitary or medical provision; unemployment on a prodigious scale, both among the middle classes and the masses. ..."

In him now there is no room left for compromise. Says he: "Every thinking person knows that the whole conception of Dominion status belongs to past history; it has no future. . . . We want to be completely free with no reservations or exceptions ... in order to join a Federation of Nations, or a new World Order. . . . We do not want the so-called protection of the British Army or Navy. . . . The parting of the ways has come."

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